Is Marxism Eurocentric? A View from Latin America
Posted by onehundredflowers on December 4, 2009
This was originally posted on monthlyreview.org.
From Marx to Morales: Indigenous Socialism and the Latin Americanization of Marxism
by John Riddell
Over the past decade, a new rise of mass struggles in Latin America has sparked an encounter between revolutionists of that region and many of those based in the imperialist countries. In many of these struggles, as in Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales, Indigenous peoples are in the lead.
Latin American revolutionists are enriching Marxism in the field of theory as well as of action. This article offers some introductory comments indicating ways in which their ideas are linking up with and drawing attention to important but little-known aspects of Marxist thought.
Eurocentrism
A good starting point is provided by the comment often heard from Latin American revolutionists that much of Marxist theory is marked by a “Eurocentric” bias. They understand Eurocentrism as the belief that Latin American nations must replicate the evolution of Western European societies, through to the highest possible level of capitalist development, before a socialist revolution is possible. Eurocentrism is also understood to imply a stress on the primacy of industrialization for social progress and on the need to raise physical production in a fashion that appears to exclude peasant and Indigenous realities and to point toward the dissolution of Indigenous culture.1
Marx’s celebrated statement that “no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed”2 is sometimes cited as evidence of a Eurocentric bias in Marxism. Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov, Marxist theorists of the pre-1914 period, are viewed as classic exponents of this view. Latin American writer Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa quotes Kautsky’s view that “workers can rule only where the capitalist system has achieved a high level of development”3 — that is, not yet in Latin America.
The pioneer Marxists in Latin American before 1917 shared that perspective. But after the Russian Revolution a new current emerged, now often called “Latin American Marxism.” Argentine theorist Néstor Kohan identifies the pioneer Peruvian Communist José Carlos Mariátegui as its founder. Mariátegui, Kohan says, “opposed Eurocentric schemas and populist efforts to rally workers behind different factions of the bourgeoisie” and “set about recapturing ‘Inca communism’ as a precursor of socialist struggles.”4
National Subjugation
Pérez Hinojosa and Kohan both take for granted that Latin American struggles today, as in Mariátegui’s time, combine both anti-imperialist and socialist components. This viewpoint links back to the analysis advanced by the Communist International in Lenin’s time of a world divided between imperialist nations and subjugated peoples.5 Is this framework still relevant at a time when most poor countries have formal independence? The central role of anti-imperialism in recent Latin American struggles would seem to confirm the early Communist International’s analysis.
Pérez Hinojosa tells us that Mariátegui recognized the impossibility of national capitalist development in semi-colonial countries like Peru. The revolution would be “socialist from its beginnings but would go through two stages” in realizing the tasks first of bourgeois democratic and then of socialist revolution. Moreover, the Peruvian theorist held that “this socialist revolution would be marked by a junction with the historic basis of socialization: the Indigenous communities, the survivals of primitive agrarian communism.”6
Subsequently, says Kohan, the “brilliant team of the 1920s,” which included Julio Antonio Mella in Cuba, Farabundo Martí in El Salvador, and Rubén Dario in Nicaragua, “was replaced . . . by the echo of Stalin’s mediocre schemas in the USSR,” which marked a return to a mechanical “Eurocentrist” outlook.7
Writing from the vantage point of Bolivia’s tradition of Indigenous insurgency, Álvaro García Linera attributes Eurocentric views in his country to Marxism as a whole, as expressed by both Stalinist and Trotskyist currents. He states that Marxism’s “ideology of industrial modernisation” and “consolidation of the national state” implied the “‘inferiority’ of the country’s predominantly peasant societies.”8
Cuban Revolution
In Kohan’s view, the grip of “bureaucratism and dogmatism” was broken “with the rise of the Cuban revolution and the leadership of Castro and Guevara.”9 Guevara’s views are often linked to those of Mariátegui with regard to the nature of Latin American revolution — in Guevara’s words, either “a socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution.”10 That claim was based on convictions regarding the primacy of consciousness and leadership in revolutionary transitions that were also held by Mariátegui.
Guevara also applied this view to his analysis of the Cuban state and of Stalinized Soviet reality. Guevara inveighed against the claim of Soviet leaders of his time that rising material production would bring socialism, despite the political exclusion, suffering, and oppression imposed on the working population.11 (See “Che Guevara’s Final Verdict on Soviet Economy,” in Socialist Voice, June 9, 2008.)
Marx’s Views
In Kohan’s opinion, the Cuban revolution’s leading role continued in the 1970s, when it “revived the revolutionary Marxism of the 1920s (simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist) as well as Marx’s more unfamiliar works — above all his later works that study colonialism and peripheral and dependent societies. In these writings Marx overcomes the Eurocentric views of his youth.”12
Kohan identifies the insights of the “Late Marx” as follows:
- History does not follow an unvarying evolutionary path.
- Western Europe does not constitute a single evolutionary centre through which stages of historical development are radiated outwards to the rest of the world.
- “Subjugated peoples do not experience ‘progress’ so long as they remain under the boot of imperialism.”13
Latin American thought here rests on the mature Marx’s views on capitalism’s impact on colonial societies, such as Ireland. It also intersects with Marx’s late writings and research known to us primarily through Teodor Shanin’s Late Marx and the Russian Road.14 Shanin’s book can now be usefully reread as a commentary on today’s Latin American struggles.
Marx devoted much of his last decade to study of Russia and of Indigenous societies in North America. His limited writings on these questions focused on the Russian peasant commune, the mir, which then constituted the social foundation of agriculture in that country.
Russia’s Peasant Communes
The Russian Marxist circle led by Plekhanov, ancestor of the Bolshevik party, believed that the mir was doomed to disappear as Russia was transformed by capitalist development. We now know that Marx did not agree. In a letter to Vera Zasulich, written in 1881 but not published until 1924, he wrote that “the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.” The “historical inevitability” of the evolutionary course mapped out in Capital, he stated, is “expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe.”15
The preliminary drafts of Marx’s letter, included in Shanin’s book, display essential agreement with the view of the revolutionary populist current in Russia, the “People’s Will,” that the commune could coexist harmoniously with a developing socialist economy.16
Ethnological Notebooks
These drafts drew on Marx’s extensive studies of Indigenous societies during that period, a record of which is available in his little-known Ethnological Notebooks.17 We find his conclusions summarized in a draft of his letter to Zasulich: “The vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies.”18
In her study of these notebooks, Christine Ward Gaily states that where such archaic forms persist, Marx depicts them fundamentally “as evidence of resistance to the penetration of state-associated institutions,” which he views as intrinsically oppressive.19 The clear implication is that such archaic survivals should be defended and developed.
The Marxists of Lenin’s time were not aware of this evolution in Marx’s thinking. Thus Antonio Gramsci could write, a few weeks after the Russian October uprising, “This is the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat.”20 Yet despite their limited knowledge of Marx’s views, the revolutionary generation of Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Gramsci, and Lukács reasserted Marx’s revolutionary stance in combat with the “Eurocentrist” view associated with Karl Kautsky and the pre-war Socialist International that socialist revolution must await capitalism’s fullest maturity and collapse.
Shanin generalizes from Marx’s approach to Russia in 1881 in a way that links to a second characteristic of Latin American revolution. “The purest forms of ‘scientific socialism’ . . . invariably proved politically impotent,” he argues. “It has been the integration of Marxism with the indigenous [i.e. home-grown] political traditions which has underlain all known cases of internally generated and politically effective revolutionary transformation of society by socialists.”21
Here we have a second field of correlation with the Latin American revolutionary experience, with its strong emphasis on associating the movement for socialism with the tradition of anti-colonial struggle associated with the figures of the great aboriginal leaders and of Bolívar, Martí, and Sandino. This fusion of traditions emerges as a unique strength of Latin American Marxism.
Mariátegui captured this thought in a well-known passage:
“We certainly do not wish socialism in America to be a copy and imitation. It must be a heroic creation. We must give life to an Indo-American socialism reflecting our own reality and in our own language.”22
Following the October revolution of 1917, Marx’s vision of the mir’s potential was realized in practice. The mir had been in decline for decades, and by 1917 half the peasants’ land was privately owned. But in the great agrarian reform of 1917-18, the peasants revived the mir and adopted it as the basic unit of peasant agriculture. During the next decade, peasant communes co-existed constructively with the beginnings of a socialist economy. By 1927, before the onset of Stalinist forced collectivization, 95% of peasant land was already communally owned.23
There is a double parallel here with present Latin American experience. First, the Bolsheviks’ alliance with the peasantry is relevant in Latin American countries where the working class, in the strict sense of those who sell their labour power to employers, is often a minority in broad coalitions of exploited producers. Second, survivals of primitive communism, including communal landholding, are a significant factor in Indigenous struggles across this region.
National Emancipation
A third correspondence can be found in the Bolsheviks’ practice toward minority peoples of the East victimized and dispossessed by Tsarist Russian settler colonialism. Too often, discussions of the Bolsheviks’ policy on the national question stop short with Stalin and Lenin’s writings of 1913-1916, ignoring the evolution of Bolshevik policy during and after the 1917 revolution. Specifically:
- The later Bolsheviks did not limit themselves to the criteria of nationhood set out by Stalin in 1913.24 They advocated and implemented self-determination for oppressed peoples who were not, at the time of the 1917 revolution, crystallized nations or nationalities.
- They went beyond the concept that self-determination could be expressed only through separation. Instead, they accepted the realization of self-determination through various forms of federation.
- They implemented self-determination in a fashion that was not always territorial.
- Their attitude toward the national cultures of minority peoples was not neutral. Instead, they committed substantial political and state resources to planning and encouraging the development of these cultures.25
On all these points, the Bolshevik experience closely matches the revolutionary policies toward Indigenous peoples now being implemented in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.
Ecology and Materialism
Finally, a word on ecology. The boldest governmental statements on the world’s ecological crisis are coming from Cuba, Bolivia, and other anti-imperialist governments in Latin America.26 The influence of Indigenous struggles is felt here. Bolivian President Evo Morales points to the leading role of Indigenous peoples, “called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life.”27
This claim rests on an approach by many Indigenous movements to ecology that is inherently revolutionary. Most First-World ecological discussion focuses on technical and market devices, such as carbon trading, taxation, and offsets, that aim to preserve as much as possible of a capitalist economic system that is inherently destructive to the natural world. Indigenous movements, by contrast, begin with the demand for a new relationship of humankind to our natural environment, sometimes expressed in the slogan, “Liberate Mother Earth.”28
These movements often express their demand using an unfamiliar terminology of ancestral spiritual wisdom — but behind those words lies a worldview that can be viewed as a form of materialism.
In pre-conquest Andean society, says Peruvian Indigenous leader Rosalía Paiva, “Each was a part of all, and all were of the soil. The soil could never belong to us because we are its sons and daughters, and we belong to the soil.”29
Bolivian Indigenous writer Marcelo Saavedra Vargas holds that “It is capitalist society that rejects materialism. It makes war on the material world and destroys it. We, on the other hand, embrace the material world, consider ourselves part of it, and care for it.”30
This approach is reminiscent of Marx’s thinking, as presented by John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology. It is entirely appropriate to interpret “Liberate Mother Earth” as equivalent to “close the metabolic rift.”31
Hugo Chávez says that in Venezuela, 21st Century Socialism will be based not only on Marxism but also on Bolivarianism, Indigenous socialism, and Christian revolutionary traditions.32 Latin American Marxism’s capacity to link up in this way with what Shanin calls vernacular revolutionary traditions is a sign of its vitality and promise.
I will conclude with a story told by the Peruvian Marxist and Indigenous leader Hugo Blanco. A member of his community, he tells us, conducted some Swedish tourists to a Quechua village near Cuzco. Impressed by the collectivist spirit of the Indigenous community, one of the tourists commented, “This is like communism.”
“No,” responded their guide, “Communism is like this.”33
Related Reading
Hugo Blanco. The Fight for Indigenous Rights in the Andes Today.
John Riddell. COMINTERN: Revolutionary Internationalism in Lenin’s Time.
John Riddell. The Russian Revolution and National Freedom.
Footnotes
- Álvaro García Linera, “Indianismo and Marxism” (translated by Richard Fidler), in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. David Bedford, “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress,” in Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 14, no. 1 (1994), 102-103. Hugo Blanco Galdos, letter to the author, December 17, 2007.
- Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 1, p. 504.
- Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa, “La heterodoxia marxista de Mariátegui.” Rebelión, October 30, 2007.
- Néstor Kohan, “El marxismo latinoamericano y la crítica del eurocentrismo,” in Con sangre en las venas, Mexico: Ocean Sur, 2007, pp. 10, 11.
- See, for example, V.I. Lenin’s report on the National and Colonial Questions to the Communist International’s second congress, in Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 31, pp. 240-41; and the subsequent congress discussion and resolution, in John Riddell, ed., Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite!, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991, vol. 1, pp. 216-290.
- Hinojosa, “Mariátegui.”
- Kohan, “Eurocentrismo,” p. 10.
- García Linera, “Indianismo.”
- Kohan, “Eurocentrismo,” p. 10.
- Ernesto Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” in Che Guevara Reader, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003, p. 354.
- See, for example, “Algunas reflexiones sobre la transición socialista,” in Ernesto Che Guevara, Apuntes críticos a la Economía Política, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2006, pp. 9-20.
- Kohan, “Eurocentrismo,” pp. 10-11.
- Ibid., p. 11.
- Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the “Peripheries of Capitalism,” New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983.
- Shanin, Late Marx, p. 124.
- Ibid., p. 12, 102-103.
- Lawrence Krader, ed., The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Assen, NE: Van Gorcum, 1972.
- Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989, vol. 24, pp. 358-59.
- Christine Ward Gailey, “Community, State and Questions of Social Evolution in Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks,” in Anthropologica, vol. 45 (2003), pp. 47-48.
- Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution against Das Kapital.”
- Shanin, Late Marx, p. 255.
- Marc Becker, “Mariátegui, the Comintern, and the Indigenous Question in Latin America,” in Science & Society, vol. 70 (2006), no. 4, p. 469, quoting from José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversario y Balance” (1928).
- Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power, New York: W.W. Norton, 1968, p. 85.
- J.V. Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” Works, Moscow: FLPH, 1954, vol. 2, p. 307.
- See Jeremy Smith, The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917-23, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999; John Riddell, “The Russian Revolution and National Freedom,” Socialist Voice, November 1, 2006.
- See, for example, Evo Morales, Felipe Perez Roque, “Bolivia and Cuba Address the UN: Radical Action Needed Now to Stop Global Warming,” Socialist Voice, September 26, 2007.
- Ibid.
- From a presentation by Vilma Amendra of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (Colombia) at York University, Friday, January 11, 2008.
- 29 Address to Bolivia Rising meeting in Toronto, April 5, 2008.
- Interview with Marcelo Saavedra Vargas, April 21, 2008.
- John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
- See, for example, speech by Chávez on December 15, 2006, summarized in “Chávez Calls for United Socialist Party of Venezuela,” Socialist Voice, January 11, 2007.
- Blanco’s remarks to an informal gathering in Toronto, September 16, 2008.
John Riddell is co-editor of Socialist Voice and editor of The Communist International in Lenin’s Time, a six-volume anthology of documents, speeches, manifestos and commentary. This article is based on his talk at the Historical Materialism conference at York University in Toronto on April 26, 2008.
Dave Riley said
A very thoughtful and useful commentary.
Another example of the “eurocentricity” of Marxism is the failure of so many left groups in the US and (mainly) Britain to comprehend the significance of the pan Latin American fight back against neoLiberalism and the new rise in revolution there.
A standard denigration of Cuba for these sources is that the revolution isn’t real because no “soviets” exist there.
However, I think there is an earlier reference point that parallels the work of key LA figures like Marti, and that’s the approach pursued by Ho Chi Minh and his collaborators whose strategic initiatives were very clearly anti-imperialist and dedicated to creating an indigenous Marxism in practice (but with little theoretical work to reference).
While many Marxists seek to turn their back on these experiences the work of people like Hugo Blanco is now being embraced by tendencies in the Green movement as offering a clear synthesis relevant to future struggles.
Green Red said
Long time ago Carlos Mariategui had clearly stated:
“As long as the vindication of the Indian is kept on a philosophical and cultural plane, it lacks a concrete historical base. To acquire such a base— that is, to acquire physical reality—it must be converted into an economic and political vindication. Socialism has taught us how to present the problem of the Indian in new terms. We have ceased to consider it abstractly as an ethnic or moral problem and we now recognize it concretely as a social, economic, and political problem. And, for the first time, we have felt it to be clearly defined.
Dave Semple said
I note that there’s no mention (that I noticed) of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which stands in stark contrast to the Stalinist/Menshevik “two stage” theory of revolution that demanded of the Latin American societies that they trace the developmental path of the European nations.
I think the October Revolution itself gives some helpful hints (all the more important if, following Lenin, the basis of a Marxist epistemology is practice). First, clearly, it was not necessary for a ‘high level’ of capitalist or industrial development in Russia before the workers seized control of the State and production.
This should give a clear lead to Latin America; there’s no need to support a bourgeois democratic revolution – it can be shortcircuited with a move straight to the proletarian revolution.
Secondly, it’s important to understand the conditions in which the socialist revolution of Russia was defeated, because these conditions also hold true for Latin America: The continued existence of a peasantry, with a (relatively) small industrialised sector and (compared to Western Europe) a general material poverty and concomitant social problems.
If education and technical ability are not widely disseminated (as one expects them not to be, in a society where peasantry still has a part to play in land tenure), then problems arise as to the creation of elites.
Is the article arguing that the Indigenous civilisations can escape this problem by virtue of their social organisation? I’m not a social anthropologist, but it was always my understanding that the indigenous peoples of Latin America had moved far past the phase of ‘primitive communism’. If that is so, are we not idealizing the exploitative structures of the past by recommending them as an organisational model that can defeat capitalism and the potential bureaucratisation of the revolution?
Certainly this hasn’t happened in Venezuela, for all that we may enjoy the idea of linking together Marxist theory, indigenous socialism, Christian revolutionary traditions and ‘Bolivarianism’. Capitalism has not been defeated, so from a Marxist perspective, the revolution hasn’t actually happened yet.
Tell No Lies said
I think Carlos Mariategui is a far more valuable place to look for a corrective for the crude determinism of Stalin in Latin America than Trotsky. Mariategui doesn’t idealize indigenous civilization, but he does insist that its trajectory can not be understood by relying exclusively on categories derived from the European experience, and more importantly that the Latin American reality can not be understood without a proper theorization of the indigenous question. Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution tells us nothing about this.
Otto said
I also think Carlos Mariategui is more valuable than Trotsky. It would seem that Marxism has been adopted to Latin American quite well, with everything from Castroism, to the MIR to local Maoist leaders. They have taken a European concept and adopted it to a third world culture.
Jan Makandal said
Proletarian theory, in which Marxism is the center pole, can’t be developed independently of the history of the workers movement. It must be developed on the basis of our practice and the political problematic of our time. There are two main aspects of proletarian theory. One aspect is the universal characteristic of the theory and the second, the specific application of the theory in concrete reality. The definition of theory is not random citations, but the usage of concepts to represent an objective reality. Revolutionaries in their own social formations need to apply the universal theory to their specific objective reality. To repeat errors of past revolutionaries such as “workers can rule only where the capitalist system has achieved a high level of development” it is to say that proletarian-led revolutions are not possible in certain social formations. Most importantly, it is to deny the richness, with all their limitations, of the revolutionary experiences in many social formations, in this case, the important contributions of the Chinese revolutions in general and the contributions of Mao in particular (not Maoism).
There is only one “scientific socialism”, based on proletarian theory, applicable to the objective reality of any given social formation. Without revolutionary theory, there won’t be a revolutionary movement. A fusion process needs to happen of the universal aspect of the theory to the objective particularity of the complex realities we aim to transform in the dialectical relation of theory and practice. There must be an objective effect in the relationship of theory and practice on theory itself. We must recognize that proletarian theory is a science constructed in the midst of struggles inside the proletarian organization, in the relation of the universality of the science to its particular characteristics. It should not be a science already preset to serve the movement, the proletarian revolutionary organization. It can’t be a science built from the top, it has to be the product of the collective work of proletarian revolutionaries.
This process is by no mean equated to a Latin American brand of socialism, indigenous Socialism and Pan African socialism. The experiences now happening in Latin America are dominated by populism, mostly left populism,[Evo Morales, Chavez] are by no mean scientific socialism, which is primarily the business and task of the working class. The proletariat in these social formations needs to regain control and leadership of their organizations in order to pursue and achieve their historical objective that no other class can historically achieve.
It is bizarre that intellectuals will identify proletarian theory as Eurocentric but espouse Liberation theology, an anti-imperialist progressive movement, not a revolutionary one, coming straight out of Christianity, as not Eurocentric. Religion is a sub-element of the ideological field. Christianity with all its denominations is one of the ideological elements uses by imperialism and also by the dominant classes in these social formations to dominate these countries…/
Green Red said
Thanks comrade Tell no lies and Ka Otto for clarifying the useless reference to late comrade Trotsky. Permenant revolution is a phrase.
And by the way Ka Jan, Scientific Socialism is also a phrase. It is an evolving theoric ground but having the multi variable complex human society’s forseen scientifically also has its prophtic characteristic.
True, Presidente Evo Morales is not building last century style’s socialism. But is he in the least doing some reformist actions in defense of indegenous peoples of his nation?
And, until the Middle East resources and nations are not exhusted and screwed up enough by the US (and other western) imperialist, pretty much like European Union, less pressure is aimed toward the Southern American nations. Why? well, their relatives are all over the US as second hand cheap workers and, other status. That is too hot for the US to gamble as bloodily as it did/does in Middle East. Not to immediately cut her own fingers with her own swords the US liberty state does not meddle with that one.
Mariategui (whose in Marxist Archive has its own special image to enter with original people’s decoration and reads: “Certainly, we do not wish that Socialism in America be a tracing and a copy. It must be a heroic creation.
We must, with our own reality, in our own language, bring Indoamerican socialism to life.”
- in ‘Aniversario y balance’, Amauta no. 26 (17 Sept., 1928)
—
and in the begining of a presentation of his stand about anti imperialist and differences with say Asia, he directly starts talking about yes, it has neo colonial charactor and, the local bourgiosei serves imperialist ruling but when he gets up to comparison with say, China, the distinction is there. Like Mongol part and Mandarian and Cantonese and X number of other things as one China it is not in Latin America:
- – - – - –
ANTI-IMPERIALIST VIEWPOINT
by
J. C. MARIATEGUI
Presented to the First Latin American Communist Conference, June 1929.
Published: Ideelogia y peltica
Translation: Michael Pearlman, 1996
Transcription: director@marx.org, July 28 1996
To what degree is the situation of the Latin American republics similar to that of the semi-colonial countries? The economic condition of these republics is undoubtedly semi-colonial, and this characteristic of their economies tends to be accentuated as capitalism, and therefore imperialist penetration, develops. But the national bourgeoisies, who see cooperation with imperialism as their best source of profits, feel themselves secure enough as mistresses of power not to be too greatly preoccupied with national sovereignty. The South American bourgeoisies, not yet facing Yankee military occupation (with the exception of Panama), are not disposed to admit the necessity of struggling for their second independence, as Aprista propaganda naively supposes. The state, or better yet the ruling class, does not seem to feel the need for a greater or more secure degree of national autonomy. The revolution for independence is relatively too near, its myths and symbols too alive in the consciousness of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. The illusion of national sovereignty still lives on. It would be a serious mistake to claim that this social layer still has a sense of revolutionary nationalism, as in those places where it does represent a factor for anti-imperialist struggle in semi-colonial countries enslaved by imperialism, for example, in Asia in recent decades.
Over a year ago, in our discussion with Aprista leaders in which we rejected their desire to propose the creation of a Latin American Kuomintang, we put forward the following thesis as a way to avoid Eurocentric plagiarism and to accommodate our revolutionary activity to a precise appreciation of our own reality:
Collaboration with the bourgeoisie and even many feudal elements in the anti-imperialist struggle in China are explicable in terms of race and national culture that are not relevant for us. A Chinese nobleman or bourgeois feels himself Chinese to the core. He matches the white man’s contempt for his stratified and decrepit culture with his own contempt and pride in his millennia-long tradition. Anti-imperialism can therefore find support in such sentiments and in a sense of Chinese nationalism Circumstances are not the same in Indo America. The native aristocracy and bourgeoisie feel no solidarity with the people in possessing a common history and culture.
- – - –
(go to http://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/works/1929-ai.htm for the whole thing. I am slowly readig this guy but, reading his writings and seeing the differences let’s say with not only Chinese Helmsman Mao but also with Mazumdar of India, i comprehend a bit more about value of original people’s level of cultural presentation to have importance in the revolutionary movement and…
Jan Makandal said
Scientific socialism is not simply a phrase but the end of a revolutionary process as well as the beginning of another process, Scientific socialism is a concept that have theoretical value, in constant mode of deepening, where as the working class is leading the popular masses to a classless society. Scientific socialism is the end of a revolutionary process and the beginning of another under the leadership of the working class. Class antagonism doesn’t disappear automatically but material conditions are being constructed in which class antagonism will disappear. Scientific socialism is the determining role of the social relations of productions in relation to the development of the productive forces. The ultimate objective of scientific socialism is the abolition of the existing condition of capital and reproduction of capital: wage-earning. Scientific socialism is the period where the working in alliance with the rest of the masses is dealing with a dual reality the defense of the revolution and the dissolution of the State Apparatus: the dissolution of the State as the determining factor in this duality. Only under the leadership of the proletariat the real emancipation of human, in all social category [indigenous included] could be achieved and accomplished.
In the US, in the belly of the beast, the role of the progressives and revolutionaries are to build an autonomous mass movement to unify the people’s camp to struggle against imperialism here and abroad.
“True, Presidente Evo Morales is not building last century style’s socialism. But is he in the least doing some reformist actions in defense of indigenous peoples of his nation?”
Agree, I must add our support need to be critical due to the limitation of his government and the limitation of left populism and the capacity of the dominant classes and imperialism to recuperate these reforms in their own interest. These reforms are being implemented in a dominant capitalist mode of productions dominated by imperialism.
Green Red said
Dear Ka Jan Mackandal,
With your statement:
- – - – - -
Scientific socialism is not simply a phrase but the end of a revolutionary process as well as the beginning of another process, Scientific socialism is a concept that have theoretical value, in constant mode of deepening,
- – - – - – -
i am througly satisfied and thankful. The thing is, the last two sentences that i needed to hear the most. Without needing to name the parties in the thrid world countries (and in particular in Iran,) like places that their time for struggle make it so minute to read historical changes that they are given a very summed up concept of historical (and philosophical) materialism when in struggle, to reduce it to a single book like Geroge Polietzar’s (sic?) Introduction to philosophy in which, historical materialism and stages of social formations from fedalism to capitalism, etc. as a Quranic / Biblical holy – excuse my tongue – holy shit. So let’s die for it and that’s it! But must be taking orders from the higher ranks, the ones in safe houses are the higher people and they are of course always right… now let’s give out the flyers and shut up.
What i want to point out is, when talking about Scientific Socialism, something like … that is evolving…. is truly necessitated to differentiate than what party has commanded.
Thanks a lot for pointing out yes, we need to respect Evo Morales – now how far that goes or, does that can lead to such conclusion that hence, albeit say Chavez might be befriending rotten bloody theocratic Iranian regime but – his relative reforms make him better than say that bloody Alen Garcia who is back in power.
And then, this brings that more fundamental question that in different ways i have tried (with my poor vocabulary – knowledge) to ask a vital question from Kasama comrades that is, in theory in the least, what could be the agenda of more serious revolutionaries inside those states that have gotten a moment to breath away from dictators; could it be something like support Chavez but still struggle (not with guns) for further taking lans for the poors and more key issues such as that or, or forming an almos in theory and surface – sort of more radical spots in the poverty sectors of the society (as Maoists do in say Nepal or, India) by maximizing the opportunity to make things utmost radical, without being against the social democrat regime that may be constantly endangered by the bourgiose or, or what Kasama friends? somebody speak about this vital matter? Or perhaps since we are in a first world country, talking about that is forbidden?
Does say intellegent friends like No lies or, n3w day or … have an asnwer and “dissect” this question?
Green Red said
re
What i want to point out is, when talking about Scientific Socialism, something like … that is evolving…. is truly necessitated to differentiate than what party has commanded.
i meant, like saying Evolving Scientific Socialism
or
Scientific Socialist Theory
to be honest to our audience masses
I do not believe it is so easy to achieve but then, that is my thought.
matt h said
Dave Semple:
“Is the article arguing that the Indigenous civilisations can escape this problem by virtue of their social organisation? I’m not a social anthropologist, but it was always my understanding that the indigenous peoples of Latin America had moved far past the phase of ‘primitive communism’. If that is so, are we not idealizing the exploitative structures of the past by recommending them as an organisational model that can defeat capitalism and the potential bureaucratisation of the revolution?”
It is worth reading Mariátegui’s chapters from 7 Thesis on Peruvian Analysis – particularly the three thesis “Scheme of the economic revolution” “The Indian Problem” “The Problem of the Land”. Mariátegui does take contemporary historic-ethnographic commentaries on Inca social-economic organization to present probably a romanticised view of Inca ‘primitive communism’. We could play academic-games about the truthiness of this foundation, but that would ignore a lot of the performative descriptions that Mariátegui is using.
Mariátegui, inspired by Sorel and Lenin, is in his most provocative works concerned about inspiring action. For his theory, Marxism is not to be read, debated about abstractly, and mechanized so that organization and action becomes a distant concern. Action and analysis are part of the same process.
When he writes about the indigenous population in Peru, he is responding to the liberal-conservative notions that there is some sort of cultural-error within indigenous peoples that keeps them from developing; that education (in its early 20th-century liberal form) could elevate indigenous peoples out of poverty. However on the other hand, he is also responding to mechanistic Marxists in Latin America (and abroad) who, often coming from upper-middle class backgrounds, thought that supporting the ‘development’ of bourgeois-capitalism and thus eliminating peasants and indigenous identities was necessary for the progress towards revolution. These groups are evidenced by the numerous examples of the “Communist Party” aligning themselves with the bourgeois-party against moments of revolts.
As a response to both cases, Mariátegui is writing that indigenous peoples are not ‘backwards’ or behind, they are (materially) poor because of the relationship to production within the economy – particularly the distribution of productive land. Furthermore, they are not in need of ‘socialist’ education either, they do not need to learn the value of the proletariat revolution by becoming proletariats because they, in many ways, have already a sophisticated understanding of what is to be gained from a revolution, that is the destruction of the exploitation enabled by private property. This knowledge, while based upon pre-Columbian Inca social-relations, is not a valuation of ‘primitive socialism’ as Mariátegui contributes one of his most subtle and important points: indigenous people are not ‘stuck’ in the past, but have continued to evolve and develop social relations – based upon material conditions – since conquest. Thus the ‘authoritarian’-basis of the Inca-communism has since been destroyed by colonialism, leaving behind community-organized democratically controlled concepts of collective property.
A revolution in Peru for Mariátegui is not a European proletariat revolution. The relationship between rural-peasants and urban-workers is one in which two different but valuable and revolutionary consciousnesses can be brought together. There is a lot more to be written about how Mariátegui connected on one side, his particularity of revolution, and on the other, his understanding of the universal-internationalist movement towards socialism/communism. However, in part it is a similar capacity of Latin American socialism in general that makes it more dynamic, active, passionate, and international than what we play around with in words in the global north.
Dave Semple said
My thanks, Matt H, for actually attempting to give a reply to my concern. I’ll read the chapters you recommend and then take it up with you on your blog or in a post on mine.
boris said
Something that should be discussed in connection with this article is the ongoing adivasi struggle in India against displacement and police brutality, its relationship with the Maoist movement, and its ecological consciousness. Perhaps a compilation of the theoretical and programmatic writings from India on this topic would be worthwhile.
Key here are the Maoist conceptions of “semifeudal, semicolonial” societies (which was Mariategui’s description of Peru) and “new democratic” revolutions, which theorize how the operation of imperialism reinforces precapitalist structures and hinders national capitalist development. I think these concepts show that Marxist modes of production analysis is not inherently Eurocentric.
Green Red said
Thanks a lot Ka Matt H for pointing out the value of those 7 essays that in and of it all I also have found as the most generally important parts of his writing as I skimmed through them that since I am slow in reading, have them ongoing reading. But regarding the questions I directed and have not received response about how to deal with the social democratic regimes in Latin America, Earl Gilman, as ex Trotskist friend, mentor, who has not have had much joint works with Maoists in his life (except in the least the time when MRTA guerrillas who had taken over embassy and then existing Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru/IEC had some action in California) wrote me back the answer that I hereby quote him exact as is.
- – – - – - — – —
A few comments:
To describe individual leaders as “good” or “bad” is not Marxism. There are “good” and “bad” people even in right wing parties. The real question is what CLASS they represent. In most “undeveloped countries” besides the working class, peasantry, and petty bourgeoisie (which is very important) there is also a native bourgeoisie, the Army (which functions as if it were a class by itself) and lastly the bourgeoisie tied to imperialism.
It is important to understand that the native bourgeoisie, which is relatively poor, cannot really compete against imperialist multi-nationals. It is often educated and as a result uses the same language as Marxists…with different class interests. As a result the native bourgeoisie often leads revolutionary movements…in order to betray them.
An obvious example is Ortega in Nicaragua. In Bolivia there is the case of Paz Estensoro, who became President of Bolivia in 1952 as a result of a revolution. The tin mines were nationalized and the miners were armed. 20 years later
Paz Enstennsor was a neo-liberal. Also in Bolivia the MIR
(No relation to Chilean MIR) changed from a revolutionary organization to a neo-liberal party.
There is an additional reason for leaders like Chavez and Morales. While talking in the abstract about “socialism”, they practice STATE CAPITALISM. Lenin himself was aware of the danger of state capitalism after the Russian Revolution. State capitalism is especially attractive to the Army and its Chief of Staff, as we can see today in the former Burma (Myranmar). The native bourgeoisie is often incompetent and the Army takes its place. (The Mexican Revolution was not only defeated but the government was taken over by the Generals.)
The issue today, as when Rosa Luxemburg, wrote her pamphlet is REFORM OR REVOLUTION. Of course, “reform” is “better” than Counter-Revolution. We would defend military the Chavez government and the Morales government against a right wing coup or US military intervention. But that does NOT mean we give up on REVOLUTION. Unless Chavez and Morales arm the workers and peasants, the end result will be Pinochets. My information is that the Ponchos Rojos of Bolivia, who had old weapons, no longer have any weapons.
And the militia in Venezuela has not had any military training.
I believe it is time to re-emphasize the need of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. That does not mean nationalizing everything, but it does mean a society where the workers and peasants decide (through a planned economy) what is to be produced and how the product will be distributed. That is, revolutionary DEMOCRACY. This also means DISARMING the bourgeois armies which the revolution may inherit.
EARL GILMAN
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And, thanks a lot Ka Boris for pointing out the matter.
——-
Boris:
Something that should be discussed in connection with this article is the ongoing adivasi struggle in India against displacement and police brutality, its relationship with the Maoist movement, and its ecological consciousness. Perhaps a compilation of the theoretical and programmatic writings from India on this topic would be worthwhile.
——
Well of course, nobody in the US more than Kasama comrades have ever – As far as I ever have known – paid so much revolutionary humanistic attention to the Adivasi people’s struggle and, as far as i have known, the correct policies of the ongrowing Communist Party of India (Maoist) has been so competent and suitable for Adivasi people’s interest that their improvisations and uprisings have been taught from and inspired by what Naxalytes (mainstream reference to CPI Maoists, due to a sixties uprising in a village with that name) have been doing. And even mainstream media of India, while talking almost against, still in the end they admit that if the original people (and of course the rest of that seventy percent of the people in the countryside and jungle) are not properly accommadated, no military action can have it resolved (quotation from tribal supporter):
India World News | Home
New Delhi – A Maoist rebellion spreading across India has seen an upsurge of violence with the insurgents challenging state authority, targeting national elections, “liberating” regions and carrying out massacres of policemen. The rebels have orchestrated a wave of attacks, blowing up railway stations and mobile phone towers, holding train passengers hostage and shutting down states to hurt the economy.
Indian leaders describe the insurgency as the gravest internal security threat. The challenge has only become more daunting as growing economic disparities help fuel the militancy.
Maoists are known as Naxals in India after the Naxalbari village in eastern West Bengal state where a violent peasant uprising took place in 1967. The rebels say they are fighting for the rights of the rural poor, tribal and indigenous people, and usually target security personnel and government installations.
The government has promoted mining, steel and industrial projects in those regions, triggering violent protests by villagers who say their rights and interests have been trampled.
“Through the past years, discontent has been brewing in the hinterland because the projects have displaced people from their lands and robbed them of their livelihood. They feel marginalized and discriminated against. There is bound to be a rebellion,” said Bratindi Jena, a tribal rights activist with ActionAid.
Citing uneven development and linking economic inequality with security, Premier Manmohan Singh admitted the rebels were recruiting cadres from the disaffected regions.
According to official data, Maoist militancy has spread from 13 to 20 of India’s 28 states in recent years, concentrated in a corridor stretching from the Nepal border to Andhra Pradesh state in the south.
Nearly 1,000 people, civilians, security personnel and rebels were killed in 2009, against 720 deaths last year. Many of the deadly attacks have been reported from central Chhattisgarh, western Maharashtra, eastern Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal and Orissa states.
The general elections this year were marred by violence, including a train hijacking and other attacks and bombings that killed 35 people.
In June, Maoists and their tribal supporters expelled police and administrators from the Lalgarh region near the Kolkata metropolis and declared it a “liberated zone.” That provoked an army offensive in the area which is continuing.
The following month, rebels gunned down 29 policemen across Chhattisgarh in a single day. In October, Naxal guerrillas beheaded a police officer in Jharkhand and killed 18 other policemen in Maharashtra. The insurgency unleashed a series of attacks, blowing up schools, derailing trains and torching trucks to stop transport.
Underground Maoist leaders started coming out in the open, giving interviews, and parading an abducted police officer as a “prisoner of war” prior to releasing him before national television. Later in November, images of “supreme” Maoist leader Ganapati, in hiding for over 25 years, were shown on television.
The government is now gearing up for a showdown, pitting 60,000 soldiers and police against an estimated 10,000 armed rebels.
Although smaller armed operations have begun, media reports said the government is positioning troops in the affected areas to launch a nationwide offensive by March 2010.
“There is a multi-pronged strategy that will target top leaders, win those alienated by supporting people-centric development and offer cadres a surrender-and-rehabilitation policy,” a Home Ministry official said.
Federal Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram says the government is willing to hold talks with the rebels but wants them to cease violence first.
That is unacceptable to the Maoists who believe in armed struggle. It is turning out to be a vicious circle as Singh says sustained development in tribal areas cannot take place in the shadow of the gun.
The solution is complex as Maoists have not presented a set of demands to address the problems of those they claim to represent.
“How does one negotiate?” said Suhas Chakma, director of the Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights.
“There cannot be a military solution. The government has to devolve powers to empower tribals for meaningful development. You have to give indigenous people a stake in economic development and help them access their resources,” tribal rights activist Jena said.
Copyright DPA
Otto said
Have to admit that I don’t read fast and haven’t read a lot of Carlos Mariategui’s writings. I am more aware of his influence on the left in Latin America. He has influenced and inspired many of the Marxist parties in Latin America including the Communist Party of Peru (Shining Path).
Maoism maybe the guiding ideology of the CPP, but they consider Mariategui the founder of their party. Evo Morales and Chevez bring some temporary relief of the militaristic right that suffocates the poor in Latin America, but I’m sure most of the readers of this site realize they are probably temporary and their revolutions, if they can be called that, will slide back to the right, as has happened in Nicaragua. They are driven more by populism than Marxism. But Marxism needs to become grounded in the local culture and that is why Mariategui is important to so many Marxist there. Just as Mao quoted from Lao Tzu and Mencius, so that the people of China realized that Marxism was not just a western idea being planted on them.
The indigenous people, or the Native American Indians there also need to be incorporated into any revolutionary movement. Some tribes in Peru had aligned themselves with the CPP, under Guzman, when he and his party were still an active guerrilla group.
Nationalism is probably as important to some of the people in Latin America as Marxism is.
Jan Makandal said
We need to be clear of one thing, the New Democratic Revolution in Nepal is not a political line constructed from Mao’ s theory. It is not to stay the struggle of the people of Nepal doesn’t need our support and international solidarity. The determining factor in giving solidarity to international popular struggle is to organize the popular masses, especially the working class in the social formation we are evolving in. The principal aspect of proletarian internationalism is to defeat our own dominant classes. To just support the valiant people of Nepal or anywhere else, to think the struggles of the people of Nepal will be the spark that put fire in imperialist forest is an opportunistic approach doomed for failure.
Mao’s theory on New Democracy was a dialectical approach addressing a dual reality in a social formation dominated by imperialism. It was a proletarian revolutionary rupture with that revisionist line of the two stages. The two stages lines, implemented by most political organizations in dominated social formation, only produces a class collaborationist line that could never develop simply because imperialism is a factor [even if imperialism wasn’t a factor, this line is revisionist], a very important factor in the development of the social formation in which they dominate. Imperialist domination directly and pertinently effects the relation of the feudalistic and capitalist mode of production. So, capitalism could never develop and defeat feudalism. Although the internal class struggle is determinant but imperialist domination is important as well and could even temporarily supersede the internal contradiction. In Haiti for example, the PCH [Haitian Communist Party] even dissolved itself in order not to disturb the great friend of the North. Left militants entered [and are still] the electoral arena to support capitalist candidates in order to develop policies to build capitalism as a stage in those social formations.
With imperialism and imperialist domination, dominated social formations will never fully develop a capitalist mode of production. The form of capitalism developing in these social formations is a deformed and dependent capitalism that affects the infrastructure and the superstructure. The way bourgeois democracy and bourgeois democratic structures are developing or not developing is determined, in essence, by this atrophic form of capitalism. This form of domination guarantees imperialist domination of these social formations.
Mao understood this aspect clearly and broke with the two stages. The two stages is an anti thesis of Mao’s contributions to proletarian theory. Mao’s analysis identified the social formations as semi feudal and semi capitalist. In objective reality, two modes of productions, especially two antagonistic modes of productions would never co-exist equally. The problematic of the “semi” tends to let us understand that half of the production is feudal and the other is capitalist. Negating the fact that if these two modes of productions co-exist, their co-existence is in struggle, with the objective for one to overtake and destroy the other. Therefore, in the objective reality, these two modes of production will never share the social formation as equal partners. One will tend to dominate and the dictating tendencies produced will define the domination by class struggle, imperialist domination and the “natural evolution” of the social formation. In general, even if feudalism is strong, it tends to decompose, to deconstruct and capitalism tends to generally dominate, with all its deformities, putting these social formations in a constant state of crisis [structurally and practically].
To define these societies as semi feudal and semi capitalist could lead the proletarian organizations not to collectively construct the correct political line and correct class position to transform their social formation. Aside this disagreement, Mao’s rupture with the two stages was an important contribution. The new democracy wasn’t two independent stages as defined now by Maoism. The new democracy was defining the political line of the people’s camp, under the leadership of the proletariat, in facing two modes of productions. In the revolutionary process the peoples’ camp under the leadership of the proletariat, the concept of new democracy was to allow the working class to achieve two historical tasks in the same period, one a socialist task addressing the capitalist mode of productions, the other was democratic, addressing the feudalistic mode of productions. He insisted, in theory, on the role of the proletariat and the need for the class to remain autonomous and independent. Even in the anti imperialist united front, he argued the same position, which Maoists seems to constantly overlook in theory and practice.
Green Red said
Earl Gilman, the Pro Cuba friend of mine sent the following that is what i fear the most, although, it is only in regard to Latin American ex Maoist groups sometimes vs. social democrat states like Venezuela:
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Two ex-maoist groups in Latin America have joined the right wing. One group, Bandera Rosa, in Venezuela has become the assault group for right wing opponents of Chavez. While making some correct criticisms of Chavez, they have allied themselves with forces tied to US imperialism.
In Mexico, the ex-maoist organization “Antorcha Campesina”
has allied itself with the right wing government. It is used by the government to break strikes and eliminate peasant leftist groups. Many of its supporters are illiterate peasants who receive land from Antorcha obtained from the government.
It is important to ask why maoism has resulted in such right wing formations. Maoism is self-evidently militaristic.
“All power comes from the barrel of a gun.” Most marxists would say that power comes from our revolutionary theory, which requires guns at certain moments. Lenin in “What is to be Done’ does not even mention guns. lenin was never a pacifist. But it is important to know when to shoot or who you are shooting at.
Militarism can replace theory. The day to day battle and
obtaining weapons even if offered by the enemy overshadows
revolutinary theory which does not always seem to be immediate.
Another factor, is that revolutionary democracy, i.e. soviets, workers councils are not a central part of maoist theory. Certainly, individual maoists have helped build soviets in India, etc. But soviet forms are not enough if they do not include democratic debate or allow dialectical contradiction even to take place.
The peasants in Antorcha Campesina I have talked to have never heard of Mao or any revolutionary. They are used to
fill up the rallies, to applaud, and go home to their huts.
In a sense, these peasants are exploited worse by Antorcha than by the capitalist landlords, who at least make no pretense of supporting the peasants.
The right wing needs goons, killers, and lumpen who dont think. In exchange, the right wing has handed over local and municipal power over to Antorcha. It is only a small leap to fascism which Bandera Roja has already completed.
EARL GILMAN
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accuracy of the theoric part I have no say. I only know that Maoism of some Asian countries is their best and only way. Hopefully, with completion of Nepal revolution, a wider modern understanding of Maoism can be worked upon.
zerohour said
There are many things wrong with the above statement, including the reduction of Maoism to a single quote which the author then seems to misunderstand, but for the purposes of this discussion, I want to point out that one way Eurocentrism surfaces in Trotskyism is the insistence on workers councils as the main form of organization, beside the party that is.
“workers councils are not a central part of maoist theory.”
Workers councils shouldn’t be a central part of any theory. Forms of popular power develop out of the particular histories of struggle, and cannot be specified in advance. The notion that one can take a form out of one context and assume that it can be applied universally without concrete investigation is problematic in and of itself; when that form arises out of Europe, and is promoted as one that should be adopted in all countries, esp. in the Third World, it’s Eurocentrism.
Regarding elements of Maoism that are amenable to right-wing politics, Gilman’s claims are too simplistic to be worth refuting, but keep in mind that the early neoconservative movement in the US included ex-Trotskyists and Trotskyist sympathizers: http://hnn.us/articles/1514.html. Should we then conclude the same thing for Trotskyism?
Jan Makandal said
Unity, with forces that are antagonist, is objectively opportunistic and class collaborationist. The defense of Mao from Maoism, from a critical standpoint ”one is divided into two”, is important as well. The question of proletarian revolution, proletarian led revolution is to be addressed in every social formation. The working class, in its own objective reality of specific social formation [imperialist, capitalist or dominated capitalism] have to constantly developed its political line to unify the people’s camp under its leadership to fight the dominant classes, their fundamental enemy, capital and labor as the fundamental contradiction and capital as the fundamental aspect of that contradiction. The type and form of organizations of the working class has to be defined in the concrete realities of these struggles of course with some guiding principles, elaborated by proletarians revolutionaries including Mao.
The question of class autonomy, the questions of class leadership, even in social formation where the peasantry is a principal force, is a fundamental question to defeat capitalism and feudalism. Mao insisted on the leadership role of the proletariat, in China, a social formation where the peasantry was a principal force. The whole objective of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was for the proletariat to take control of the Party. Now it is for us revolutionary to analyze this period and contribute to the objective development of our theory not to dogmatically defend it, or to uphold it because of populism: the masses where in the street.
We also need to understand the non-correspondence, in some instances, of Mao’s theories with his own practice. His own opportunism and populism in implementing his theory. Theory needs to guide practice and practice needs to validate theory. Mao, as well as all of us, is the produce and result of class struggle historically determines. To think we are above criticism is to think we are above class struggle. To think such is certainly a deviation of Mao’s contribution to proletarian theory.
Green Red said
Thanks Ka Zero Hour. Yes, absolutely, i agree he wrote reductionist and incorrect. They only thing important part of his statement for me was ;
- – -
“Two ex-maoist groups in Latin America have joined the right wing. One group, Bandera Rosa, in Venezuela has become the assault group for right wing opponents of Chavez. While making some correct criticisms of Chavez, they have allied themselves with forces tied to US imperialism.
In Mexico, the ex-maoist organization “Antorcha Campesina”
has allied itself with the right wing government. It is used by the government to break strikes and eliminate peasant leftist groups. Many of its supporters are illiterate peasants who receive land from Antorcha obtained from the government.”
- – - – - – - –
Is that true that some so called Maoist groups end up with aligning themselves with reactionaries say, in Venezuela against Chavez alike people?
When there was the Soviet Union’s regime acting almost alike imperialist countries, to appose them, pro Maoist groups for example in Angola sided with the pro US groups. But then was then. Why now?
Of course workers councils are only a form of communist struggle. But for example say the form of self ruling that Maoists of India brings about for Indian original people in jungles; or same for Nepal. Yes. Believing only in industrial worker’s soviet is absolutely a Euro / Trotskist (and some other variations of so called “ortodox Marxists”) is wrong.
But what about the for example above mentioned cases?
Of course, when a regime gets as corrupted as Peru’s so called social democrat party (APARA i think they were called) and dirty guys like Alan Garcia is ruling hell yes. That sort of “social democrat” is the same bastard who killed PCP comrades in prison while they were hosting a so called socialist international gathering in Lima. My dilemma is how to deal with cases like Morales or, Chavez who are in the least anti imperialist or a sort and National bourgeois. I shall read the article you have used as reference and thanks.